Anselm’s work On Free Will is a dialogue between a student and his teacher, and it opens with a question which will be familiar to all who have been exposed to debates about predestination. The student asks,
Since free will seems to be repugnant to grace, predestination and God’s foreknowledge, I want to understand freedom of will and know whether we always have it. For if ‘to be able to sin and not to sin’ is due to free will, as some are accustomed to say, and we always have it, why do we sometimes need grace?[1]
The teacher at first responds by proving that ‘free will is [not] the power to sin or not to sin. Indeed if this were its definition, neither God nor the angels, who are unable to sin, would have free will’.[2] The reason Anselm gives is that people have certain states which, firstly, they ought to be in, and secondly, are good for them to be in. Anselm maintains that is the one who cannot be led out of this state by something else who is more free. Since to sin is always ‘indecent and harmful’, a being who cannot sin is more free than one who can. Therefore, free will cannot be ‘to be able to sin and not to sin’.
If free will is not ‘to be able to sin or not to sin’, then what is it? The teacher begins to answer this with a question for the student: ‘Why do you think they [humans and angels before the fall] had free will: to attain what they want or to will what they ought and what is expedient for them to will?’’[3] The student simply replies, ‘the latter’, and the teacher accepts this and moves on.
But let’s pause here. What do you think is the purpose of free will in your life?
To get what you want.
To desire what you should and what is good for you.
I would imagine that most of us would lean towards option 1. After all, what would be the point of having a will which could desire things by itself, if it wasn’t meant to get those very things? Yet this isn’t the option that Anselm chooses. Instead, he says that we have free will because it gets us to desire what we should and what is good for us. Having read De Grammatico I can confidently assure you that Anselm is very careful with the words he uses, so he is probably not just being pious here. Therefore, why isn’t free will given to us to get what we want?
In On the Fall of the Devil, Anselm draws a distinction between the will for happiness and the will for justice. Putting this another way, this is a distinction between willing what is good for you (your happiness), and willing what you ought to (justice). The teacher in On the Fall of the Devil uses a thought experiment about an angel who was created with only the will for happiness or only a will for justice. With only one of these, the angel would not be called moral or immoral, for it would be acting in accordance with necessity. It’s only by being given both these wills that the two wills must be harmonised so that the angel can be called moral or immoral.
This can help us with answering why we had free will before the fall. If we consider that ‘what you want’ and ‘what is good for you’ are the same (your happiness), then the options Anselm proposes can be restated as:
To will your happiness.
To will justice and your happiness.
This makes much more sense. Usually when we think about free will, we think about its moral consequences. Therefore, if we only had free will to will our happiness, we would be like the angel who wills it of necessity. We would not be moral or immoral, and what we usually think of as free will wouldn’t be what we have. Instead, we have both the will for happiness and the will for justice, and we are free to harmonise these wills in accord with what is right. Then, along with Anselm, we can say that ‘they had free will for the sake of rectitude of will.’[4]
But why do we have to have this rectitude of will? Is it for justice itself or for the sake of something else? It must be for the sake of justice itself. So, Anselm states that
Since all liberty is a capacity, the liberty of will is the capacity for preserving rectitude of the will for the sake of rectitude itself.
Anselm considers this definition perfect, because it includes everything required to embrace the free judgement of a rational creature and exclude everything else. It applies to God, to angels, and to humans.
Even God cannot take away our rectitude of will
Why is free will defined as a ‘capacity for preserving rectitude of will’? I think the reason is that the more secure something is in itself, the freer it is. Freedom needs to be contrasted not with ‘limited choice’, as we might think about it in the modern world. It needs to be contrasted with ‘coercion’.
Anselm indirectly suggests this when rejecting free will as ‘to be able to sin or not sin.’ For example, Aristotle says that a forced or violent action is ‘that of which the moving principle is outside, being a principle in which nothing is contributed by the person who acts – or, rather, is acted upon, e.g. if he were to be carried somewhere by a wind, or by men who had him in their power.’[5]
If you can’t be carried away by the wind or by other things who have you in their power, you are freer than something which could be. Similarly, if your will has the capacity to preserve itself against outside movers, then it is freer than otherwise. As we do have this capacity, we do have free will.
Anselm makes the will’s freedom clear with an example. God is omnipotent, he is the Almighty One. So, if you could be in a position where even God could not move you, would you not be free? If God could not force your will to move, wouldn’t that make it free? Anselm argues for this,
Student. Can even God take away rectitude from the will?
Teacher. This cannot happen. God can reduce to nothing the whole substance that he made from nothing, but he cannot separate rectitude from a will that has it.
Student. I am eager to have the reason for an assertion I have never before heard.[6]
I am too! The teacher says that rectitude (rightness) of will is the same thing as justice of will. Since God is absolutely just, no one can will justice without God wanting them to. Therefore, if God were to act to remove someone’s rectitude/justice of will, this would be the same thing as for God both to will and to not will their rectitude/justice of will. ‘Therefore nothing is more impossible than that God should take away the rectitude of will,’[7] and ‘you can see that there is nothing free than a right will since no alien power can take away its rectitude’.[8] Yet all the same, ‘he is said to do this when he does not impede the abandonment of this rectitude’.[9]
Or put it this way:
No one has rectitude of will unless God wills it.
Should God remove rectitude of will from anyone, he does so willingly.
If he removes this rectitude of will willingly, he wills to remove it.
Therefore, he does not will the rectitude of will of the one from whom he removes it.
Therefore, if God were to remove rectitude of will, he both will and doesn’t will rectitude of will.
This is impossible.
Therefore, God cannot remove rectitude of will.
God is the foundation of your being. He made you what you are. Therefore, it is God who provides you with both what you should desire and what is good for you. Your will has been given to you to will these things. And since ‘no alien power’ can take these away from you, this will is free.
If our will cannot be forced by another, even by God, then why did the fall happen? We sinned because our will was not perfectly free, but still had within it the capacity to sin willingly. The teacher says,
The apostate angel and the first man sinned through free will, because they sinned through a judgement that is so free that it cannot be coerced to sin by anything else. That is why they are justly reprehended; when they had a free will that could not be coerced by anything else, they willingly and without necessity sinned. They sinned through their own free will, though not insofar as it was free, that is, not through that thanks to which it was free and had the power not to sin or to serve sin, but rather by the power it had of sinning, unaided by its freedom not to sin or to be coerced into the servitude of sin.’
Are we free now?
Since rectitude of will can only come from God, when it is abandoned by His creatures, they cannot have it again except by receiving it from God. Our rectitude of will is ‘a passing breeze that does not return’ (Psalm 78:39) without God. Anselm even says ‘I think it is a greater miracle when God restores rectitude to the will that has abandoned it than when he restored life to a dead man’.[10] Therefore, we are dead in our sins, we are slaves to sin, and we cannot will the right thing unless God restores our rectitude of will.
However, one of the consequences of Anselm’s position is that we simultaneously possess a free will and we are slaves to sin.
We are free because, even though we cannot acquire rectitude of will (or will/desire the right thing) without God granting this to us, we still have the capacity to preserve rectitude of will.
Therefore, ‘because it cannot return from sin, it is a slave, because it cannot be robbed of rectitude, it is free.’[11] Further, ‘it is always naturally free to preserve rectitude if it has it, even when it does not have what it might preserve.’[12]
[1] Anselm, On Free Will, 1
[2] Anselm, On Free Will, 1
[3] Anselm, On Free Will, 3
[4] Anselm, On Free Will, 3
[5] Aristotle, Ethics, Book 3 Chapter 1. 1110a3-4
[6] Anselm, On Free Will, 8
[7] Anselm, On Free Will, 8
[8] Anselm, On Free Will, 9
[9] Anselm, On Free Will, 8
[10] Anselm, On Free Will, 10
[11] Anselm, On Free Will, 11
[12] Anselm, On Free Will, 11